The chart above is for 8.00 p.m. 05th August and applies all month.
Perhaps the most interesting spectacle this month, and a naked eye event, will be the changing pattern formed by Saturn, Mars and the bright star Spica, shown by the white dot beside Mars.
The brightest constellations, and easy ones to make out, at that time of the evening, are Sagittarius and Scorpio in the south, and Cygnus, the Swan, or Northern Cross high in the NE.
Cygnus contains the bright star Deneb, which forms a point of the Summer Triangle, an astronomical asterism involving an imaginary triangle drawn on the northern hemisphere's celestial sphere, with its defining vertices at Altair, Deneb, and Vega, being the brightest stars in the three constellations of Aquila, Cygnus, and Lyra.
The English term was popularized by British astronomer Sir Patrick Moore in the 1950s, although he did not invent it. The Austrian astronomer Oswald Thomas described these stars as "Grosses Dreieck" (Great Triangle) in the late 1920s and "Sommerliches Dreieck" (Summerly Triangle) in 1934. The asterism was remarked upon by J. J. Littrow, who described it as the "conspicuous triangle" in the text of his atlas (1866), and Bode connected the stars in a map in a book in 1816, although without label.
The Perseid meteor shower peaks on the night 11-12 August, conveniently a Saturday night, Sunday morning for those of you who want to stay up late.
